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Little Airplane Productions
Little Airplane Productions is a TV production studio headquartered in New York. It was founded by Josh Selig. It produced Oobi and many other preschool shows, such as Wonder Pets for Nick Jr. and 3rd & Bird for the BBC. Oobi was the first show ever made by the company. The original Oobi shorts from 2000 were made as an experiment to see if Josh Selig wanted to start his own studio. When they were successful, he decided to found Little Airplane. Little Airplane's production logo uses a scene from the Sesame Street film "I'm a Little Airplane." Josh Selig shot and directed the film back when he was a staff writer on Sesame Street. For season 1 of Oobi, the vanity card featured a full-screen scene. For season 2, it was updated to widescreen, with Little Airplane's website now advertised at the bottom. Little-Airplane-2003-card.png|Vanity card for season 1 Little-Airplane-2004-card.png|Vanity card for season 2 Josh Selig described the studio's beginning in a 2010 article he wrote for the Kidscreen magazine: :I had been Sesame Workshop for 10 years and I loved it and I felt very secure. But with one five-minute phone call from the new executive producer, it was over. I felt abandoned. This had been my first and only job in children's TV and, as far as I was concerned, Sesame Street was the children's TV industry. So I did what any naïve preschool TV writer/producer would do: I started a business. I called it Little Airplane Productions. And it was a very slow take-off. :For the first year it was just myself and my friend Lori Sherman (now Lori Shaer) working out of a one room office in Tribeca and sitting on the cheapest Ikea furniture we could find. Back then, we paid ourselves according to a formula we called, “A third, a third and a third.” Meaning, every time we finished a small production job, we would split whatever profit was left in the budget three ways. Lori got a third. I got a third. And Little Airplane got a third. That first year we both earned less than the guy washing our windows. But we really didn't care. :It was an incredible year of hustling, struggling and learning. We had to figure out how to meet and impress unfamiliar companies like Noggin, Disney, Discovery Kids and Nickelodeon. We were scraping by on small live-action service jobs and a little bit of our own original IP, an interstitial series called, "Oobi!" But we happily discovered that there was life after Sesame Workshop. (source) at the studio]] Oobi was eventually developed from an interstitial series into a full-length show. It ran for two seasons and was successful enough to cement Little Airplane Productions as a key player in the preschool TV industry. Using profits from Oobi, Selig was able to start an animation division at his studio, which gave way to his next Nick Jr. series, Wonder Pets. Since 2006, Little Airplane has focused mainly on animated projects. The studio works closely with a child psychologist, Dr. Laura Brown, on all of the shows they make. She writes a curriculum for each show and helps the crew get feedback from kids on the scripts once production starts. The Little Airplane office is currently located at 207 Front Street in New York City. It offers tours of its main wing and animation lab. A few props from Oobi are on permanent display. In the mid-2000s, the company ran a program called the "Little Airplane Academy," which taught adults the basics of making a preschool show. It covered everything from "pitches to directing to legal and business affairs." (source) TV series *''Oobi'' *''Wonder Pets!'' *''3rd & Bird'' *''The Adventures of Napkin Man!'' *''Super Wings'' *''P. King Duckling'' *''Doctor Space'' Short-form series *''Go, Baby!'' *''Tobi!'' *''Small Potatoes'' *''The Olive Branch'' *''Sing It, Laurie!'' Films *''The Time-Out Chair'' *''Domo Rock!'' Category:Crew